An October report on youth drug use across the county found that Idaho has among the lowest rates of use for several categories of drugs.
The research article was published by US Drug Test Centers, a company that manages more than 20,000 drug testing centers across the country, and was based on drug use rates gathered in 2017 by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Idaho had the seventh-lowest percentage (16.9 percent) of people under the age of 21 who had drunk any alcohol in the last month and the tenth-lowest percentage (10.4 percent) who had engaged in binge-drinking in the last month. Both of those rates have decreased by around 30 percent since 2008, in line with the national trend over that stretch of time.
Marco Erickson, the incoming program director for Community Youth in Action and longtime prevention coordinator for Eastern Idaho Public Health, said that he personally saw the findings as a good sign of how well the state had done in preventing youths from getting addicted.
Among children and teenagers, Idaho had 24th highest rate of marijuana use with 6.34 percent of those ages 12 to 17 having reported marijuana use in the last month. While that was higher than a majority of other states, it was below the national average of 6.83 percent, and Idaho had one of the lowest rates for marijuana use among 18- to 25-year-olds at just over 16 percent.
The Gem State had the eighth-lowest percentage of teenagers and young adults who had vaped in the last month at 5.8 percent.
Idaho’s teen rates of cocaine use and painkiller addiction were also below the national average in 2017.
The only drug whose use was far above average among Idaho’s youth was methamphetamine. The state had 0.33 percent of children between the ages of 12 and 17 try meth at least once in the last year, more than every state except for Hawaii, and the usage rate for young adults was also above the national average of 1.1 percent.